Category: essays

I’m traveling this week, so here’s something from 2020…

So there I was, working on a short story that took over my brain, right when I ought to be working on the book that took over my brain when I was supposed to be working on the new Sarah Tolerance book. (For those following along at home: 1) Sarah Tolerance Book < 2) Urban Fantasy Thing < 3) Short Story. This is why Madeleine cannot have nice things.)

So I want to finish this story. When its finished I can go back to #2, so I can return to #1. In aid of these goals, I’ve been writing on the train home from work. Because that means I’m writing by hand, it also means there are gaps. There are also gaps where I cannot quite figure out how to get from point A to point B (trust me, this is part of my process. Assuming I have a process). This weekend I’ve been trying to fill up the gaps, knit the thing together so I can start doing the really important stuff of going through and making all the words stack up into story order. I’ve actually written the last scene of the story–yea, even the last sentence–yet I still have this vertiginous feeling that the ending is constantly receding into the distance, as if it were trying to enact one of Xeno’s paradoxes (the one where you keep halving the distance between you and your objective, and therefore never quite reach the objective itself).

In my imagination, the ending just keeps getting up from its seat, taking ten steps back, and sitting down again. And there am I, adding more and more words to get the middle part done, and watching the ending of my story recede from sight. In my imagination, my story is taunting me each time it gets up and moves away from me. Malicious story: it’s not a happy thing to imagine.

Fortunately, I’ve been here before. At some point in almost every piece of fiction I’ve ever written, it seems the book will never end, that bits will keep appending themselves in different places, and that the whole concern will simply fall over from its sheer ungainly largeness and lie on the metaphorical floor like a dead thing.

Part of writing (or any creative process) is persevering even when every iota of your diminishing brainpower is insisting that you should have listened to your Uncle Larry and taken up air conditioning repair. Go forth and persevere.

Or at least my writing.

In the mid 1990s I worked for three years as an editor at Acclaim Comics. It was a fun job, and a frustrating job, and I loved it–I had been a comic book reader as a kid, my brother had been working as a letterer for over a decade, so I had some prior exposure to the world of comics. It all seemed to be fated… until Acclaim Comics’ parent company (which had, um, not been managed well) went under and took the comic company out as well. So I found myself unemployed, and took up La Vie Boheme Freelance. Since I had two young kids, this actually worked out pretty well.

One of the weekly routines I fell into was lunching with a bunch of friends who also worked in publishing/comics on Wednesdays at the Malibu Diner on 23rd Street (down the block from a good comic book shop, so that after lunch people could stroll down and pick up that week’s new comics). One of the Malibuvians (as we styled ourselves) was Keith DeCandido, who was then the editor for a line of Marvel Comics tie-in novels. And I was a freelancer, looking for work. When I said as much at lunch one day, Keith asked me who my favorite Marvel character was. “Daredevil,” I said without hesitation. Alas, he had a Daredevil novel in the pipes, but he promised to remember me for the next time Daredevil came up in the rotation. We finished our lunch. Life went on much as usual.

Until a couple of weeks later when he called me: the writer for his Daredevil novel had to drop out and how quickly could I get a detailed (like chapter-level, if not scene level) outline to him, and it had to be by the beginning of July (it was then mid-June). So I wrote a 30 page outline, detailed to the chapter and sometimes the scene level.

It was excruciating: I am, by nature, a semi-pantser: usually I write 20-40,000 words on a book and then I write an outline to tell me where I’m going to go from there. Sometimes the outline is as simple as four or five beats. Chapters? They’ll be in there somewhere. Scenes? Likewise. But Marvel wants what Marvel wants, and I wanted the gig. So I did it, turned it in. Keith called me back and said “Looks pretty good. I suspect they’re going to want this and this thrown in, but otherwise… start writing, and when the approval comes in I’ll tell you if there are any changes.

I started writing. I finished the book at the beginning of September, turned it in to Keith, and we got the approval of the outline two weeks later. Adjustments were made, Daredevil: The Cutting Edge was accepted, we all went along with our lives. That’s the cover featured above. (You will note there is neither a title for the book nor the author’s name… everyone was so in love with the art that they kind of forgot those essentials. Ah, well. My name made it to the spine.)

What did I learn from this? Well, I learned that I can write an 80,000 word book in two months. But what I really learned is something that still marks my writing. 

Daredevil, if superhero comics or TV or movies are not your jam, is a character who is blind. Stan Lee took the old cliche about a blind person’s other senses improving to compensate for the deficit and put it on steroids. As a kid Matt Murdock was hit by a truck hauling chemical waste through Manhattan; the accident took his sight, but somehow the chemical muck with which he was spattered augmented his senses. So every time Matt (who becomes Daredevil) walks into a room he can hear and smell, and taste, and feel everything that is going on around him. He knows where an adversary is by listening for a heartbeat–but also for the disturbances of the air through which the adversary is moving. He can tell what someone had for breakfast by the scent of eggs and ketchup on the guy’s breath, or on his tie. He has learned to sift through all the input of his heightened senses to get information that he can use, not just to navigate the world as a blind man, but to kick ass as a superhero.

What this meant for me as a writer was that I had to put in the sensory cues when Matt walked into a room or Daredevil confronted a villain. So for the two months I was writing the book, every time I walked into a room, or went around a corner, if I smelled or heard something, I found myself trying to parse it. Not just “that’s a smelly alleyway” but “cat urine, damp earth, brick dust, ammonia cleaning products.” Not just “noisy room” but which voices were dominant, and what the other sounds–an elevator moving behind the walls, traffic noise wafting up from the street–were. Tastes. Textures. Proprioception (very important when you’re a blind superhero fighting with others in a variety of settings).

Writing this book required that I confront, in a sense, my privilege as a sighted, and sight-centered person. And I’ve carried the lessons I learned with me since then. Perhaps it’s particularly important to me because a lot of the writing I’ve done since Daredevil takes place in a different time and place from our own. There’s nothing like smell, for example, for creating a place that is then: every hired carriage Sarah Tolerance gets into has its own, usually unpleasant, galaxy of smells. So does every large group of people, particularly in a time and place when daily or weekly bathing was the exception rather than the rule. Working on the Daredevil book reminded me that everyone has, not only a unique look, but a unique smell. That a voice is not just a tone or a timbre, but is shaped by a variety of factors including the speaker’s health and upbringing. That the surface of skin is composed, not just of the skin itself, but of the substances–sweat, oil, cosmetics, medicines–that may be on the skin, and their scents.

As an exercise, try writing a scene where the descriptors are all about sound and touch and taste and smell (and proprioception, if that seems a useful tool). It will feel awkward at first, especially in terms of describing a character physically. If Daredevil confronts a guy who is unkempt, maybe getting over a hangover, and trying to avoid giving some information about something he’s witnessed, he won’t be able to say whether the guy is blond or brunette, but he can judge his height and weight, smell the sour taste of stale alcohol on his clothes and his breath, and hear the heightened heartbeat that suggests he’s lying.

Try it. It’s just one more useful tool in a writer’s box.

I have for been several weeks preparing four books for publication: re-releases of the first three Sarah Tolerance Mysteries, to be followed a month later by the release of The Doxies Penalty, the fourth in the series. Because I’m publishing with an independent micro-press, I’m doing a lot of the production work myself, which means I have been engaging with my own text up close and personal.

The good news? I still like all four books. I can find passages that give me pleasure (and have found comparatively few that make me wince and say “what was the Author thinking?” This is not always the case when looking over your old work. But of course, as I read, I notice things. Like,” damn, the Author uses a lot of em-dashes.”

A thing to know about me: my major in college was theatre, and while I mostly did behind-the-scenes stuff (props and costumes and especially stage management) I did a good deal of performing. Having read a lot of plays and thought in terms of performance then, when I’m writing now I think in terms of the weight and rhythm of words as they’re spoken aloud. If I’m reading my own work I  want markers, flags for performance. Thus em-dashes, which I think are most useful pieces of punctuation for capturing the rhythm of the way people speak.

Much as I love Jane Austen’s books, in real life people rarely speak in full sentences. People interrupt themselves–and others–all the time. For people interrupting themselves, I suppose one could use the parenthesis (another of my favorite forms of punctuation). But because there’s usually an imperative quality to interruptions, and abruptness, I prefer em-dashes.

Here’s a bit from my new Sarah Tolerance book, The Doxies’ Penalty:

“I would think you’d prefer to hand him to Sir Walter—”

“In the general way, we’d find ‘im some justice from our own—if ‘e’s one of ours. Look, I cannot promise to look out for the fellow, nor give him up, without I ask a blessing to it.”

There’s an interruption of the first speaker, which really demands an em-dash. And the second speaker interrupting himself to qualify what he’s saying. I could, in justice, use a comma to set off “if ‘e’s one of ours.” But the comma doesn’t imply the sort of emphasis that self-interruption usually requires. 

You could say that I’m leaving myself—and other performers—information on how to read the words, aloud or otherwise.

When I was doing a final pass on the manuscript for Doxies I did a search for the old-style double-hyphen which (in typewriter days) stood in for an em-dash, which would be added later in typesetting. Because sometimes I use a double hyphen rather than Option-Shift-Hyphen (on a Mac keyboard). And inevitably I find some. I also find inconsistent spacing around my em-dashes, and other typographic horrors requiring repair. I am closing in on my deadline to hand the MS over to the formatter, and I want to make their work as pain-free as possible.

If all goes well, The Doxies Penalty, Sarah Tolerance #4, will be available mid-October.* And yes, that was a plug. When you’re working with a micr0-press you also have to pitch in on marketing where you can.

__________

*The first three books in the series, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, will be re-released in September. See comment above about marketing.

 

I decided to re-read Mansfield Park. It’s one of my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels (who am I kidding? All Austen’s novels are in some wise my favorite) even though the heroine, Fanny Price, is shy and neurotic and not robust–she’s sort of the Bizarro-World version of Elizabeth Bennet. But Fanny is the moral center of the novel–which sounds pretty stodgy, but really isn’t.

Fanny is a poor girl who lives with her cultured, wealthy relatives, where she is useful, unregarded, and has nothing to do but run errands and observe the doings of the family. She is taught and nurtured by her exceptionally virtuous cousin Edmund, with whom she is secretly in love for most of the book.

It’s good that Fanny has at least one exceptionally virtuous person in her life, because everyone else–from her dreadful Aunt Norris to her Very Upright uncle Sir Thomas Bertram (whose fortune derives from his slaveholding plantations in Antigua) to Edmund’s tosspot brother Tom, to her vain and self-absorbed cousins Maria and Julia–is problematic. And that’s before we get to the Crawfords.

How to describe the Crawfords? A charming brother and sister who are visiting in the neighborhood. They’re fun and witty and good looking and well-to-do… and have the moral compass of chewing gum. It takes everyone else a long while to figure this out, but Fanny knows at once. This is partly because Virtuous Cousin Edmund immediately falls for Mary Crawford, and Fanny sees him tie himself into knots trying to excuse Miss Crawford’s worldly, calculating behavior (Edmund is going to be a clergyman; Miss Crawford would prefer he not, because clergymen are stodgy and boring). But also because Henry Crawford is a monster of charming ego, and Fanny watches the damage he does.

So there I was, reading Mansfield Park for the umpteenth time, and a scene I remembered wasn’t there. I paged ahead and confirmed that the scene is not in the book. Which meant it was doubtless from the film of Mansfield Park from 1999, with Frances O’Connor as Fanny and Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund. Thus I had to watch the movie (as well as finish reading the book). Mansfield Park-the Movie (hereafter MPTM) follows the plot of the novel, but it also draws heavily from Austen’s own letters and notes (there are a lot of comments about the slave trade–which had been abolished in 1807, although slavery in the British colonies had not); in this version Fanny writes stories of the same sort that Austen herself wrote, and quotes her lavishly (“run mad as often as you choose, but do not swoon!”). In this treatment Fanny is not only an observer but a critic, and a sharp one. And while it’s not canon (heaven knows what Miss Austen would have thought) it works very nicely.

But they add/change some things. To explain what, and how it lands, I’m going to give the traditional SPOILERS warning.

Here is a cake to separate you from the information I’m about to disclose.

Okay. In Mansfield Park, book and film, Henry Crawford amuses himself on his visit by flirting heavily with both Maria and Julia Bertram, with the stated aim of making them fall in love with him, but without any intent to follow through and actually marry one of them. Since Maria, the older daughter, is already engaged, this is doubly caddish behavior. When the game palls, he leaves, hurting both sisters. Fanny watches this happen. Maria then marries her bubble-brained but wealthy fiancé, Mr. Rushworth. Julia goes off with them on their honeymoon. With the coast now clear of Bertram sisters, Mr. Crawford returns… and falls seriously in love with Fanny. Who does not trust him as far as she could throw him.

So far, this is the plot of MP and MPTM. Mr. Crawford proposes to Fanny (to the delight of Sir Thomas, who thinks it is a highly flattering match for his penniless niece). Fanny refuses Crawford, flat out. She cannot tell her uncle (or anyone else, really) why she dislikes Mr. Crawford without outing her cousins’ flirtations with the man.

Here the two paths diverge.

In MP, Fanny goes to Portsmouth to visit her birth family. Fanny’s cousin Tom is taken seriously ill (and Mary Crawford writes to Fanny about how swell it would be if only Tom died, leaving Edmund heir to the family title and fortune, and therefore much more eligible to marry herself). Meanwhile Mr. Crawford visits and tries to get Fanny to change her mind. She doesn’t. Crawford goes away, encounters Maria Rushworth née Bertram, seduces her, and the two run away together, to the horror and distress of the Bertrams. Fanny returns to Mansfield Park to comfort the family in their affliction; Edmund discovers that Mary Crawford is just as morally bankrupt as her brother (without Fanny having to disclose anything–which also absolves her of the right to dance in circles saying “I TOLD YOU SHE WAS EVIL!”) And in the fullness of time Tom recovers, Maria is abandoned by Crawford, and Edmund realizes that he loves Fanny. They live happily ever after.

Not bad for the moral center of a novel.

In MPTM it’s much the same, but. Fanny doesn’t just go home to visit her birth family–she’s sent there by Sir Thomas, who is seriously pissed that Fanny turned down Crawford’s proposal. While she’s in Portsmouth (living with her vulgar, poor family) Crawford comes. He is charming and solicitous and doesn’t make Fanny feel bad about her vulgar, poor family–and when he proposes again she has a moment of insanity and says Yes. The next morning, when he comes to see her, she backs out of the engagement. Crawford departs in high dudgeon. NOW Tom Bertram becomes ill, and Fanny returns to Mansfield Park to comfort the family. While there Mary Crawford confides in Fanny all the “if only Tom would just die, already” stuff. Then Maria comes home to visit her brother–and Crawford shows up, and sleeps with Maria IN HER FATHER’S HOUSE, and they run away together. And Mary Crawford suggests that it’s all Fanny’s fault–if she’d only taken Henry when he offered, but the poor boy isn’t used to having to wait for anything, so…

So what was accomplished with the restructuring? In the book Crawford does not make a second proposal, and Fanny certainly never has a moment where she says yes. In the movie it’s implied that part of the reason that she accepts Crawford is that her birth family is so awful that she just cannot (and this was part of Sir Thomas’s thinking when he sent her home: try what life according to your actual marriage prospects is like, Fanny!). It also gives Crawford a little more motivation to seduce Maria–he’s smarting from Fanny’s rejection. And we get to see Mary Crawford say awful things directly to the Bertrams in the middle of their drawing room: advising them that if the manage things right, some parts of society will shun Maria, but she’ll still have enough of a social life to make it okay. The watcher sits there thinking Shut Up! That might fly in the upper reaches of the aristocracy, but for a country baronet and his family? No. And saying it to Edmund, who is now a clergyman, is a kind of moral cluelessness that is very special indeed.

I can see, from the filmaker’s perspective, why they made the changes. The story remains essentially the same, and might be somewhat more comprehensible to a modern audience. It moves better to have scenes played out rather than described in letters (although Fanny discovering Maria and Crawford in bed would not have been Miss Austen’s first choice. Or second). But having seen the movie and read the book at virtually the same time, I still don’t think there’s a world in which Fanny Price would ever say Yes to Henry Crawford, even if her birth family was twice as bad.

The world is too much with me this week; this was originally written (and posted elsewhere) in 2020.

Many writers (I won’t say all writers, because I don’t know them all, but at this point I think I have a pretty decent random sample) know a bunch of different weird things.  Many writers (see above caveat) were probably the sorts of kids who stored up random factoids, or had deep pools of info about odd things, or could list all the kings of England from Edward the Confessor onward (that used to be one of my parlor tricks, along with reciting the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales).  Many writers research science, or history, or Alexandrian mythology, or sanitation in ancient China, or, or, or…

The thing is, if you’re the kind of person who picks up spare facts the way other people nab pocket change, it will sooner or later burble to the top of your consciousness.  My husband, the Gray Eminence of rec.arts.music.beatles, can reliably identify which out-take from which bootleg two bars of a given Beatles song is from, and probably knows all sorts of arcane info about who was recording that day, and can expound at length about the cool fill Ringo was using, or why George was using that guitar or…  I, who have only the laywoman’s hey-I-was-there-when-the-Beatles-were-cool-the-first-time appreciation of the music, can still enjoy Danny’s over the top minutiae.  And when I need an in-house set of professional ears, I have it.  Your friends and beloveds are fonts of all sorts of information, if you only think to ask.  And if they don’t know, someone among them will almost certainly know someone who will know.

Mumbly-years ago I was writing a novel set in New York, in which our Hero had to go to Rikers’ Island, the NYC jail complex that sits in the middle of the East River.  First thing I learned was the difference between a jail and a prison (jails are short term, prisons long term, for one thing, and are generally run by local law enforcement–sheriffs and police departments; prisons are state- or Federally-run, and are for people who are in for more than 365 days).  Second thing I learned was that, at the time at least, it was very hard indeed to find out logistical facts about the prison (how do you get there? is the protocol different for lawyers and visitors? what’s the layout of the place).  Now, of course, there’s a website for directions, with information on the various facilities, and so on, but in these long-ago days, not so much.  So I asked a friend’s husband, the only lawyer I knew, if he knew any of this stuff.  He didn’t, but a friend did, and after an hour of fascinating conversation I knew more about Rikers’ Island than I’d thought possible.  Thus: the power of friends and their friends.

I’m a member of a list called Joys of Research, which is a stunningly valuable focused-crowd-sourcing tool: it’s simply a bunch of writers who have different areas of expertise.  Ask about medieval latrine technology or the decomposition rates of bodies or the weight of an 1795 flintlock pistol and someone will know.  And if no one knows, they’ll have suggestions about where to find the information.  Just being able to narrow the informational sources down a little is often a huge help when you’re time-crunched.

I’m not organized enough to make a list of who of the people I know I can ask for what, but you might be.  And an added benefit? You get to know people better.  I am hampered by shyness and an early inculcation of the goofy notion that asking people questions was rude.  (I know.  I know.)  But asking questions about another person’s interests is a wonderful way of deepening a friendship, especially if you’re able to ask about things your friend is really interested in.  My friend Steve can talk mammalian biology until the cows come home (he might even know why the cows come home). My friend Claire knows medieval history, my friend Kevin is a go-to for herbal information and cookery; my friend Ellen is a stunning well of mid-20th century American pop-culture. When I started working on Sold for Endless Rue I discovered that my friend Tess, who had been the administrator of Clarion when I went there, knew tons about the literature of medieval medicine.  Connections FTW!

And never forget that you might be the one who knows something someone else needs to know.  And that feels really good too: you get to be the pro from Dover and expound on something near and dear to your knowledge base too.